1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to methods and systems for processing anti-aliased digital images.
2. Description of Related Art
As anti-aliased line art becomes increasingly available to the printing industry, the ability to perform the same type of processes available to binary line art on anti-aliased line art is desirable. For example, it is desirable to control the widths of lines of anti-aliased line art when converting from a first resolution to a second resolution. Additionally, processes such as document cleaning, document restoration and image enhancement are desirable for anti-aliased line art just as much as for binary line art.
This invention provides methods and systems for processing anti-aliased line art.
This invention separately provides systems and methods to extend the well developed and effective processes used in processing binary line art to anti-aliased line art.
In various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems according to this invention, an anti-aliased, or gray-edged, image is converted to a high resolution binary image using a binary rendering technique. Once the image is in the high resolution binary form, a variety of useful operations, such as template matching, morphological filters, Boolean logic filters, threshold convolution or correlation, image filtering, or other binary operations can be performed. The modified high resolution binary image is then transformed into a lower resolution image using an anti-aliasing technique, thus providing a smooth and distortion-free anti-aliased image to the greatest extent possible.
Other features and advantages of the various exemplary embodiments of the methods and systems of this invention are described below or are apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description which follows.